New Guide Explains How and Why America Has Become So Unequal

Growing Apart: A Political History of American Inequality, a new publication of Inequality.org by Colin Gordon, dives deeply into history, explores current events, and examines the root causes of inequality.

June 25, 2013.

Growing Apart: A Political History of American Inequality, a new publication of Inequality.org by Colin Gordon, dives deeply into history, explores current events, and examines the root causes of inequality.

Washington DC – Inequality.org, the best online resource on income and wealth distribution, has just published the most up-to-date guide yet on why America has become so unequal, more unequal than any other major developed nation.

Gordon’s new work, referenced this past weekend in the New York Times, taps the latest research on inequality – from all over the world – and links online readers to a broad array of source material.

“No one has done what Colin Gordon has done here with Growing Apart,” notes Chuck Collins, the co-editor of Inequality.Org and the director of the Institute for Policy Studies program that maintains the site. “No one has so completely and concisely helped readers understand the gaps that so plague us.”

Growing Apart uses interactive graphs – on everything from wages to wealth – to illustrate just how unequal the United States has become, in both historical and comparative terms. Gordon’s online pages guide us to understanding how dramatically income and wealth distribution has changed inside the United States and how we stack up against our international peers.

The new online publication also critically assesses the various explanations most commonly advanced to account for our current-day inequality, particularly those that stress broad and immutable trends in global competition, technological change, or family structure.

In fact, Growing Apart relates, we owe our contemporary inequality much more to specific public policy choices than any broad and immutable trends. And that reality, in turn, points to new choices we can make that offer a possible and promising exit from our staggeringly unequal times.